Category Archives: The Dork Report

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King Crim­son Album Art: In the Wake of Posei­don
A com­menter got in touch with some very inter­est­ing details regard­ing Tammo de Jongh’s paint­ing for King Crimson’s In the Wake of Posei­don… or should I say twelve paint­ings? If this sounds inter­est­ing to you too, well, what are you wait­ing for? Read all about it in our revised visual essay.

I agree 99% with the pop­u­lar con­sen­sus regard­ing Mike Daisey: he lied. But the tiny 1% nobody seems to be talk­ing about is both­er­ing the hell out of me: if his now infa­mous mono­logue The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is a work of fic­tion, why can’t we talk about it as a work of fiction?

Until recently, Daisey was forg­ing a rep­u­ta­tion as a pop­u­lar monolo­gist in the tra­di­tion of the late Spald­ing Gray: fus­ing the mechan­ics of auto­bi­og­ra­phy, jour­nal­ism, and the­ater to tell sto­ries with the power to move indi­vid­u­als and sway pop­u­lar opin­ion. That is, he was, before his enor­mously pop­u­lar show The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was dra­mat­i­cally revealed to be largely com­prised of half-truths and fab­ri­ca­tions. Daisey ini­tially required the­aters to adver­tise it as “a work of non-fiction”. When he began to feel the heat, he ini­tially claimed he had merely taken dra­matic license, but finally issued an actual apol­ogy.

The imbroglio has been Tweeted, blogged, pod­casted, and ana­lyzed to death over the past two weeks, but here are the key inci­dents: Daisey’s orig­i­nal stage mono­logue (with a free tran­script on his web­site), an episode of the ven­er­a­ble radio pro­gram This Amer­i­can Life fea­tur­ing a ver­sion of it, fol­lowed by their aston­ish­ingly grip­ping retrac­tion. My favorite analy­ses of the ensu­ing fall­out came from Dar­ing Fire­ball (Sep­a­rat­ing the Baby From the Bath Water) and Derek Powazek (How to Spot a Liar).

The gen­eral con­sen­sus among the cognoscenti, digerati and NPR set alike, is that Daisey made a fatal error in pre­sent­ing his piece as jour­nal­is­tic report. I agree. But most of these ana­lysts go on to express hor­ror and out­rage that Daisey’s show goes on. The mono­logue inspired a pop­u­lar peti­tion on Change.org (now there’s a peti­tion against the peti­tion). The­aters are not can­cel­ing Daisey’s future shows and are refus­ing refunds for past show­ings. Gru­ber, in an episode of his pod­cast The Talk Show, attrib­utes this to the the­ater busi­ness run­ning on a tight mar­gin, as if it were sim­ply a mat­ter of eco­nom­ics. Inter­est­ingly, The Under­state­ment reports that many the­aters are also dar­ing to defend the “essen­tial truth” of Daisey’s work.

Mike Daisey went to great lengths to pre­serve the fic­tion that “The Agony and Ecstacy of Steve Jobs” was non­fic­tion (photo credit: mikedaisey.blogspot.com)

Which brings me to the tiny sliver of this whole story that I believe needs to be addressed: there is a mas­sive dis­con­nect between jour­nal­ists and, for lack of a sin­gle term, artists/writers/performers/monologists/etc. So Mike Daisey largely lied about what he saw in China; so what? Should his admit­tedly pow­er­ful mono­logue be wiped from the record? Can we not talk about it as a work of lit­er­a­ture? Here is the point where, per­haps, the Eng­lish majors of the world ought to take over from the journalists.

Ira Glass states in the This Amer­i­can Life retrac­tion that Daisey’s use of the lit­er­ary device of speak­ing in the first per­son trig­gered his brain to reg­is­ter it as truth. Other out­raged jour­nal­ists seem to not want to even enter­tain the idea that Daisey’s work might be an effec­tive work of fic­tion on its own terms. Daisey was free to present his first-person account as truth (or as Stephen Col­bert might term it, “truthy”) within the con­text of his play itself, but he erred by also doing so on This Amer­i­can Life, Real Time With Bill Maher, CBS News, and other news venues. He deceived accred­ited jour­nal­ists with hard-earned rep­u­ta­tions in order to pre­serve the fic­tion that his piece was nonfiction.

But what if he hadn’t? What if he had, from the begin­ning, pitched The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs as what it actu­ally is: a fic­tion­al­ized dra­matic account, told in the first per­son but, to use a famil­iar phrase, based on a true story. Most of what Daisey claims he per­son­ally wit­nessed are actual ongo­ing events at Fox­conn and other fac­to­ries in China. Work­ers’ con­di­tions are harsh and unjust, not only to west­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties, but also in vio­la­tion of Chi­nese reg­u­la­tions. Many com­menters have mused on how Apple Inc. may have been harmed by Daisey, both finan­cially and in terms of rep­u­ta­tion. It most likely has to some mea­sur­able degree, but no mat­ter how much I may per­son­ally use and like many of their prod­ucts, I don’t believe Apple is any more pos­sessed of sen­si­tive feel­ings than any other multi­na­tional cor­po­ra­tion. Apple is no more deserv­ing of pro­tec­tion from a work of fic­tion than — to fab­ri­cate a hypo­thet­i­cal exam­ple — Exxon might be if a writer were to pub­lish a novel telling the story of an envi­ron­men­tal activist vis­it­ing the 1989 Valdez spill.

The cur­rent refusal to con­sider that Daisey’s dis­cred­ited work might still have merit as a piece of lit­er­a­ture smacks to me of two things:

Exces­sive apolo­gia to Apple. Apple is justly beloved for design­ing great prod­ucts and seems to be mak­ing a great effort to improve its envi­ron­men­tal impact and sup­plier respon­si­bil­ity. But no one needs to worry about their feel­ings being hurt.

A gen­eral dis­trust and fear of fic­tion and lit­er­a­ture. On a grand scale, you often see this when video games are blamed for school vio­lence, rock lyrics for drug use, or comic books for juve­nile delin­quency. When a prob­lem is too big to deal with, often the eas­i­est thing to do is ban or burn a book. Now, of course those are extreme cases, and all that’s hap­pen­ing here is a few jour­nal­ists dis­cred­it­ing one man’s dra­matic mono­logue. Per­haps jour­nal­ists spend too much of their careers deal­ing with ver­i­fi­able facts, and are ill-equipped to deal with the some­times messy busi­ness of ana­lyz­ing literature.

Daisey is not a jour­nal­ist, and his sit­u­a­tion right now is not the same as that of Jayson Blair, who was rightly run out of town for his numer­ous fab­ri­ca­tions pub­lished by the New York Times up until being dis­cov­ered as a fraud in 2003. He’s more akin to James Frey, whose sup­posed mem­oir A Mil­lion Lit­tle Pieces was revealed in 2006 to have been bet­ter clas­si­fied as a novel. Had it not been mar­keted as his true life’s story, it prob­a­bly would have been lost in the fray of book­stores’ crowded fic­tion aisles. Daisey’s medium is the the­ater, worlds away from the media jour­nal­ists work in. No the­ater­goer or novel reader expects absolute ver­i­fi­able truth from lit­er­a­ture. The tools of lit­er­a­ture have the power to enter­tain, instill a sense of cathar­sis in the audi­ence, to illu­mi­nate, and per­haps even to move peo­ple to action. All of these goals seem to have moti­vated Daisey to do what he did.

It’s now near-impossible to appraise the merit of Daisey’s work on its own terms. Inter­viewed by Ira Glass in the This Amer­i­can Life episode Retrac­tion, he stated that The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is the “best thing I’ve done.” Clearly, he knew he had really hit on some­thing that touched a nerve in his audi­ences, and it brought him a great deal of acclaim that later cur­dled into noto­ri­ety. He wrongly felt that the notion his work was fac­tu­ally true was essen­tial to its con­tin­u­ing pop­u­lar­ity, which pro­vided him many ben­e­fits: larger audi­ences, fame, and likely a greater income than the vast major­ity of strug­gling the­ater artists are ever likely to glean from their work. I think it’s clear now that had he pre­sented his work as fic­tion, it would have reached far fewer peo­ple, but still have had its unde­ni­able impact on those that did expe­ri­ence it. The shame is that now we’ll never know.

The sil­ver lin­ing is he con­tributed to an ever increas­ing spot­light on the com­plex issue of China’s labor prac­tices, and a grow­ing aware­ness that the con­sumer elec­tron­ics indus­try could not exist as we know it today with­out it.

Don’t you wish you could turn your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch into The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, as seen in the epony­mous series of nov­els by Dou­glas Adams? Of course you do! Install these free wall­pa­pers, open up The Guide, grab your towel, stick out your Elec­tronic Thumb, and hit the space­ways. But do try to avoid Vogon vessels…

For a mere 8 dol­lars (sent whizzing vir­tu­ally through the inter­webs to The Big Word Project), I have rede­fined two words in the Eng­lish dic­tio­nary. All in the name of pro­mot­ing The Blog That Few Read The Dork Report.

Every­one, take out your pens and scratch out the fol­low­ing two words from your dic­tio­nar­ies: CHAD and DORK, ’cause they belong to me now, fools.

The Onion AV Club’s How’d it get burned? 22 film remakes dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nals piece points out that while Al Pacino’s Scar­face has become a mod­ern gangsta icon, nobody slaps the orig­i­nal Paul Muni incar­na­tion from 1930 onto t-shirts, posters, and cheezy mir­rors for sale by street ven­dors. A quick Googling con­firmed that there are no 1930/1983 Scar­face mashups to be found. So I set out to rec­tify that with some quickie Pho­to­shop jobs.

It has crossed my mind that the rea­son no one seems to have posted this sort of thing on the inter­tubes yet is that it’s prob­a­bly semi-illegal. If not against the movie stu­dios own­ing the rights to the prop­erty, then at least to the estate of Paul Muni. But this is just for fun, and I’m not try­ing to sell t-shirts or anything.

UPDATE: I took another spin through Google after fin­ish­ing the above post, and found a few exam­ples of prior art:

Kids-in-Mind is my new favorite site, boldly mak­ing no dis­tinc­tion between par­ents (look­ing for infor­ma­tion about the lat­est piece of crap their kids are beg­ging to see) and right-wing cul­tural war­riors (look­ing for some­thing else upon which to blame soci­ety). Accord­ing to my non-scientific sur­vey of the site con­tents, Scary Movie is pos­si­bly the most offen­sive, child-warping movie ever made, out-raunching even Borat. Hon­or­able men­tion: a sur­pris­ingly strong show­ing by Pride & Prej­u­dice with a Sex/Nudity score of 3 out of a pos­si­ble 10. Excerpt: “A woman kisses a man’s hand and they hug. A man and a woman argue, and then they come close to kiss­ing each other but do not.” (fea­tur­ing guest report­ing by Andrea)

A fas­ci­nat­ing scrap of Hol­ly­wood his­tory is uncov­ered by the New York Post: learn not only that Hitch­cock snubbed Speil­berg, but more inter­est­ingly, why! (guest sub­mis­sion from Andrea)